Death was not the void Jordan had been taught to fear. It was a cold, silent ocean, and he was suspended in its depths. There was no pain, no memory, no self—only a profound and endless stillness. The poison from the copper dart had been a fire that consumed his nervous system, but that agony was a distant echo, a storm on a faraway shore.
Then, a spark.
Deep within the frozen core of him, something refused to be extinguished. It was not his heart, not his brain, but something older, something the Architects' scans had never detected, lying dormant beneath the surface of his soul. A will, sharp and unyielding, that simply said: No.
In the blood-slicked corridor, his body, which had been twisted in the rigor of a toxic death, twitched.
A low, wet, sucking sound broke the relative quiet, punctuated only by the distant alarms. The coppery dart, embedded in his sternum, was being pushed out by the knitting of bone and the re-weaving of muscle. It clattered to the floor, a small, insignificant sound that carried the weight of a miracle.
Jordan sat up.
His movements were jerky, unpracticed, like a puppet learning its own strings. He drew in a ragged, shuddering breath, his lungs burning as they reinflated. The black, necrotic veins that had marbled his skin faded, the color returning to a healthy, living hue. He looked down at his chest; where a fatal wound had been, there was now only a puckered, angry red scar, fading by the second.
His gaze, clearing from the fog of death, fell upon the woman lying a few feet away. One of the other test subjects. She had taken a dart to the thigh. But she had no hidden spark, no dormant will to defy the inevitable. She was pale, her eyes open and glassy, a pool of crimson spreading from the torn femoral artery the dart had left behind. She had bled out while he was busy being reborn. A fresh, cold grief settled over his resurrection.
---
Eva's makeshift army was a river of desperation flowing through the sterile halls. She had managed to free over thirty test subjects from their cells—a haggard collection of scarred, terrified, and sometimes strangely altered individuals. They moved as a single, panicked organism, their footsteps a frantic drumbeat against the polished floor.
"The hangar bay is two levels down! There's a service elevator at the end of this corridor!" Eva shouted, her voice cutting through the din. Hope, a dangerous and fragile thing, began to flicker in the eyes of the survivors.
It was then that the door to a nondescript laboratory hissed open ahead of them, and three figures emerged, blocking their path.
The first was a giant, a hulking brute of fused muscle and gleaming, gunmetal-gray cybernetics. One of its arms was a massive hydraulic claw, and a single red eye glowed from a face that was more metal than flesh. A Goliath, a pure engine of destruction.
The second figure made Derek's breath catch in his throat and Leo's knuckles turn white on his bat.
"Zane?" Derek whispered, the name a prayer and a curse.
It was him, and it wasn't. Half of his face was still the pale, scarred visage they remembered. But the other half was a nightmare of sculpted iron and intricate wiring, a cybernetic graft that pulsed with a faint blue light. His once-human eye on that side was replaced by a cold, mechanical lens that whirred softly as it scanned them. He stood with a rigid, unnatural posture, his remaining organic hand clenched at his side, the other a polished steel talon.
And the third was an Architect. But unlike the others, his silver mask was etched with a single, vertical crimson line. He carried no weapon, only an aura of absolute authority. His masked gaze swept over the ragged group of survivors, past the hulking Goliath, past the cyberized Zane, and landed squarely on Eva.
The silence he created was heavier than any alarm.
His synthesized voice was calm, almost conversational. "Subject E-01. Your resourcefulness is noted. A commendable, if futile, effort."
Eva stood her ground, her mind racing, calculating the odds. The Goliath was a problem. A cybernetically controlled Zane was a tragedy and a devastating weapon. She couldn't fight them both and protect the survivors. Her eyes flickered to Maya, who stood at the periphery of the group, her head tilted, observing the new players with a detached, analytical curiosity. She could help, Eva thought. But the risk was too great. Unleashing Maya here could turn the corridor into a slaughterhouse where friend and foe were indistinguishable.
The Architect's voice broke through her calculations. "When you see him," he said, the tone laced with a dark, knowing amusement, "tell Wolfen I said hello."
He then turned, his white coat swirling, and walked back into the lab, the door hissing shut behind him. The Goliath and the cybernetic Zane remained, unmoving, blocking the path to the elevator.
Wolfen? The name meant nothing to her. It was a ghost, a taunt, a piece of a puzzle she didn't have the board for.
The standoff was absolute. The survivors huddled behind Eva, their hope curdling back into fear. Leo and Derek were paralyzed, staring at the horrifying fusion of their friend and the Architect's machinery. The sight of Zane, broken and remade into a puppet, was a psychological blow that felt more damaging than any physical attack.
Maya's lips curled back, not in a snarl, but in a subtle, intrigued smile. She took a single, silent step forward, her obsidian claws flexing. The Goliath's red eye swiveled to track her, and Zane's mechanical lens whirred, focusing.
The fight had not started. But the air was thick with the promise of a violence that would tear them all apart. And behind them, a resurrected Jordan was just getting to his feet, a new and unknown variable in a game that was rapidly spiraling out of anyone's control